About "FosterForce"

Overview

Shelter Assist is a product that aims to help animal rescues run their operations. We have two partners that have agreed to use the software: Hope’s Here Animal Rescue (Glen Burnie, MD) and The Little Black Dog (Alexandria, VA). There are thousands of these organizations around the country and they are often small and staffed entirely by volunteers. Most importantly, they don’t have physical places to house their rescue animals and rely entirely upon volunteers to foster the animals until they can find forever homes. Keeping track of dogs, their medical histories, foster availability and adopters can be overwhelming. We aim to build software that makes that much easier for these money strapped rescues.

We are in the early stages of figuring out what this software needs. So far we’ve talked to both organizations and had several meetings wherein we have asked a lot of questions to understand their processes. Next, we hope to learn more about the fosters’ experiences. We do however know that we will first need to build out the database to keep track of the dogs and the fosters. Most of the stories will be around that functionality to start with: dog and foster tracking. Most of the next stories will be around building those tables and those views.

We imagine a system that fosters don’t need to create a password for to provide information but rather use a token link to authenticate in. Volunteers for the organization on the other hand, would have to log in and they would see more information.

Both Hope’s Here and TLBD only work with dogs but our long term vision is to scale this software to more rescues and keep building out helpful features to cover more scenarios.

Research

Find our design research here: https://miro.com/app/board/o9J_lUPKdDg=/ Includes

• Journey maps
• Roadmap
• Synthesized user interview

Designs

InVision Link

Team

Product Managers: Maggie Larkin and Steph Wolfram
Product Designer: Patrick Bagley
Product Developers: Jim Gay, Chris Zimmerman, Kayla Webb, Peter Cho, Ian Bulmer, Ali Topalogu, and probably you, the person reading this!